


Build Me a City

by golden_d



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Possible trigger warning: 9/11-related imagery and references, Reverse Big Bang Challenge, limbo fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_d/pseuds/golden_d
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He will always be alone, and then he will die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Build Me a City

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Build Me a City](https://archiveofourown.org/works/727277) by [echochen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echochen/pseuds/echochen)



> Written for Inception Reverse Bang Round 2; inspired by [Juana's](http://juana-a.livejournal.com) lovely [art](http://illsinganyway.livejournal.com/2380.html) and, in turn, Richard Siken's poem "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out". A thousand thanks to blue_fjords for the beta!
> 
> ETA 8/21: Now with Chinese translation by Wildimmortal! You can read it [here](http://mtslash.com/viewthread.php?tid=68162&extra=page%3D1%26amp%3Bfilter%3Dtype%26amp%3Btypeid%3D14); registration is required for the site.

Every morning more leaves fall from the tree, creating red-gold-orange piles, heaps of autumn on the dying grass. They will all fade to brown eventually. Only the tree will be left, barren and alone. 

If you were to ask him how he knows this, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Someone must have told him, once.

If you were to ask him how he knows there are other someones in the world, he wouldn’t be able to tell you that, either. Perhaps it came to him in a dream.

What he knows is:

He will always be alone, and then he will die.

\--

The red-brick house and its tree and its grass are an oasis of color. The rest of the world is stark. The sky is white with clouds; the buildings rise out of steel and glass and hard gray stone. Here and there are buildings of marble or weathered wood. The street is dark asphalt, the sidewalk a mosaic of browns and grays. The lampposts are ornate iron and their lights give no warmth. 

Sometimes he sees smoke. There is never a fire.

The world is cold, but it is beautiful.

(Something nags at the back of his mind. _This is just a city how can it be a world how can there not be more why is this the only—_ )

The world is beautiful.

\--

He has a closetful of sleek black (or charcoal or graphite or sand or chocolate-colored) suits wherever he goes. If he is in that building, the closet is there; if he crosses the street, it is there too. Nothing about this is strange: Things happen when he needs them to happen, when he wants them to happen. The world forms itself around him.

\--

Every night, he dreams. It is never the same dream, though now and then there are recurring images, but this is the first time he has seen the man. The man leans close to him and smiles, says nothing but, “I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party, darling,” and all that he can see is the man’s blue, blue eyes.

\--

_Did you find him?_

_I think so. Yes. But he’s different - it doesn’t seem like it’s really him._

_Try again._

\--

He dreams the man again and again and again. Each dream is only a glimpse, a fragment - the man eating pancakes or leaning against a brick wall or stretched naked on a bed. He hears the man’s voice, but he can’t make out the words.

\--

He is jogging along the banks of a river, its waters dark and tumultuous, swollen with rain. Cormorants swoop and nest on a cluster of rocks. Boathouses stand vacant, memorials to - what? He doesn’t know. 

He is jogging because he knows it is important to stay active, because he likes the way the wind blows against him, because when he runs the only thing he needs to think of is the next step on the road ahead of him. If not peaceful, it’s calming.

He never sees anyone else because there is no one else to see. Except today, suddenly, there is a man - _the_ man - sitting on a bench on the edge of the bank. He stops short, and the man stands, approaches him. “Are you really there, darling?” the man asks. “Do you know me?”

He recoils. The ground beneath the man’s feet falls away, dropping him into the river.

He starts running again. He runs all day, runs until there is no more road, until the road loops back on itself. He doesn’t stop until the moon is casting a ghostly glow from behind the clouds. Then he finds the nearest building, opens the door (all doors are always open to him), steps through, and finds himself in the red-brick house. (All doors always lead him where he wants to go.)

\--

_Did you find him?_

_Yes. I was - I was so close._

_What happened?_

_He killed me._

\--

He dreams of ballrooms and car chases and Penrose stairs and zero gravity, of explosions and betrayals and mazes and death upon death upon death. He dreams a gun in his hand, the barrel pressed against his head - the barrel pressed against the head of the blue-eyed man. He dreams a kiss and then a gunshot.

When he wakes, he finds a gun on his bedside table where no gun had been before. He sits on the edge of his bed and holds it in his hands for a long while, considering, knowing it is loaded without needing to look. Eventually, he puts it back on the table. It will be there when he needs it.

\--

He dreams himself on an airplane, traveling far, traveling long. He dreams the blue-eyed man meets him at the airport, dreams that they walk hand-in-hand to an apartment, to a home. He dreams there are stars in the sky amidst the spires of the skyscrapers.

He dreams they are riding on a train, watching the city through the windows. “I’d do anything for you,” the blue-eyed man says. “Give you anything. Loving you, it’s - it’s larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying.”

In the morning, there is an elevated train line snaking its way through the city, waiting for him when he walks out the door.

\--

He dreams the blue-eyed man lies next to him in bed, curled around his body protectively, whispering in his ear. “I’m sorry,” says the man. He fills in the silence himself: _sorry I couldn’t be there, sorry that I was there and I left and I left you._ He doesn’t know how he knows what the man was going to say, even in a dream. 

There has never been anyone sleeping there except for him, but the other side of his bed feels cold and empty when he opens his eyes the next morning.

\--

_Did you find him?_

_Yes. But he doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t think I’m real._

_But you’re going to keep trying, aren’t you?_

_Of course. I won’t leave him there._

\--

He doesn’t notice, at first, because he’s safe inside the red-brick house and doesn’t leave it for several days. Why should he? He has no job; there are no other people. Any meaning that he has, he creates for himself. To stay inside and sleep has as much meaning as anything else.

But the next time he leaves and enters into the city, striding strong and confident, he sees a narrow brownstone squeezed between two much taller buildings. Its door is painted bright purple; the brass door knocker is in the shape of a lion’s head. He half-expects it to turn into the ghostly face of - someone. (He recalls the fleeting image of a woman, European, dark-haired, but he doesn’t know who she is or why he should remember her. He supposes she is beautiful.) It stays a lion, though, and he walks on, perturbed.

It’s the first burst of color he sees intruding on the steel city, but it’s not the last. Murals begin appearing on walls, scenes of people or plants or abstract shapes. Most are traditional frescos, but some are ornate, glittering mosaics. He doesn’t remember creating them, but he appreciates them nonetheless. 

Soon the white winter sky changes to blue, blue that mirrors itself on the glass and steel skyscrapers. The buildings have always been beautiful, but now they gleam brilliantly, blindingly. He rides the train from terminal to terminal and back again, staring out at the sky and deliberately thinking about nothing. 

If anything happens in the city, in the world, it’s because he wants it to. Therefore, he must have wanted the sky to be blue.

(So why, no matter how hard he tries, can’t he turn it back?)

\--

He raises up new buildings, spires reaching even higher into the sky, huge edifices covering a city block each. He builds towers simply for the sake of building, for the art of it, to see if he can. He builds a clock tower higher than any other building, its face looking down on the rest of the city, its voice tolling judgement every hour. He builds a copper tree, thirty stories high; he keeps the trunk shining and lets the leaves patinate; he grows an iron vine and twines it around the trunk, into the branches, where it bursts into blossoms of bronze.

He illumines the buildings with white lights like stars, in place of stars, and sets them shining so bright that when night falls the stars themselves are drowned out. He never saw the stars, or saw them only in dreams, before - before the clouds got driven away. Before _he drove_ the clouds away, because if he didn’t do it, who did? This is his city, his world; or, perhaps, he is this city’s man; perhaps he is this city embodied, in some strange way. Nothing happens that they don’t wish to happen.

But he feels, somehow, that something is driving them apart, wants to force a separation. This is his city: He will stand in its defense, and the city, in its turn, will build its walls around him.

\--

_“He’s fighting you.”_

_“Of course he’s fighting. He’s **Arthur**. Would you expect anything less?”_

_“No. So what are you going to do?”_

_“Fight back - and win.”_

\--

Neon lights swarm across his city like brightly-colored insects, like a fungus, latching onto walls and windows that had previously been sleek and elegant. _Wonderful!_ the lights read, and _Darling_ , and _Love_ , and _Dreams_. There are neon tubes bent in the shape of a red die; others, curved into an infinity symbol. He sees lights that spell out _Live!_ and _Wake!_ and others that spell nothing at all, that are curlicues and zigzags and abstractions. 

He wills them away, or at least wills them white and brilliant like the others. They only flash brighter, mocking red and pink and blue.

He builds new edifices to cover them, but the largest wall he can create might as well be nothing more than a long, low marble bench. It’s as if they are somehow protecting themselves against him - maybe even as if someone is protecting them.

So he builds himself a ladder that reaches as high and as wide as he wants it to, and climbs to the first neon sign. It blinks at him: _Be free!_ So he frees it, ripping the neon tubes off the wall. The sign sends sparks jumping at him and he suspects that this is dangerous, that he shouldn’t be doing this, but he doesn’t care. He tears apart the next sign, and the next, until the sidewalks are littered with broken lights and his hands are burned and bleeding. But the city lights shine clean.

He opens the nearest door, walks in, and is home. He goes to bed, bothering only to kick off his shoes before falling on top of the covers. He knows that his hands will have healed in the morning.

\--

He was right: When he wakes up the next morning, his hands are both unhurt and unscarred, as if nothing had ever happened. He’s tempted to look out the window to make sure that the neon lights haven’t been resurrected while he slept, but he’s not sure he wants to face a reality where they have. Better to live in ignorance for a little while, just in case. He can’t deal with neon before he’s had a cup of coffee. 

He doesn’t need coffee to recognize that there’s the faint smell of smoke hanging over everything, like a thin blanket of ash and acridity. His first thought is to check every outlet in the house, then the oven, then the toaster, the circuit breaker. Nothing.

It must be his imagination, he tells himself; a sense-memory from last night. Nevermind that the sparks from lights had smelled nothing like this - sense-memories can be erroneous, after all. Can’t they?

He drinks two cups of coffee and eats breakfast, delaying as long as possible so that he doesn’t have to look outside. Now that he’s more awake, he’s certain that the neon lights must be up again. He doesn’t want to see them.

He dresses for yardwork: jeans and a flannel shirt and work boots. The leaves from the tree have almost all fallen now; he grabs a rake as he steps into the yard and resolutely does not look at the sky. He has to glance up eventually, to brush his hair from his eyes, and when he does—

When he does, he sees that the skyline, the soaring towers of his city, is burning. No: not burning, but immolated, demolished, destroyed. He looks - perhaps foolishly, but instinctually - for planes in the air, but there are none. He supposes that, if there had been any, they would have flown away by now or been burned up themselves.

He finishes raking the leaves, bagging them up and leaving the bags in neat rows along the curb. Then he goes inside, locks the door securely, and goes up to his bedroom. He strips out of his work clothes, and goes into the bathroom where he showers away dirt and sweat. He tries to rinse away the images of the burning city, but he can’t.

He never actually gets to the point of feeling _clean_ , but once he’s thoroughly washed, he dries off and dresses himself in a three-piece suit. It’s the color of cinders, he notes, but it’s sleek and comfortable and it feels a little like he’s putting on armor. Maybe he is.

The gun is still on the bedside table where he left it. He confirms that it’s loaded, makes sure the safety is on, and slides the gun into the shoulder holster that he doesn’t remember putting on but is wearing nonetheless.

He checks the locks on all the doors, closes all the curtains on the windows. Whoever (whatever?) is attacking the city, they’re not going to be stopped by a couple of deadbolts, but the routine of it makes him feel more secure. 

A rumble starts - then it grows, becoming like the roar of a thousand lions. He dives for cover, but there’s no attack, only noise. Not at the house, anyway - once the sound has died away, he pushes back a curtain, looking out at the city. If he’d thought the skyline had been devastated before, well - evidently his imagination was too small to envision destruction on such a scale as this. Even more buildings are razed and burning. Another one begins to burn as he watches, first a slow flicker of flame, then increasing into a full-on blaze. A great black cloud of smoke reaches up into the sky.

Something flies out of the cloud - a plane? No, it’s banking too wildly; but it can’t be a bird, and far too large to be Superman. He sees a glint of gold off its wide, jagged wings; thinks, _Dragon,_ thinks _impossible_ , then thinks - is it? Is it really impossible? 

He makes himself go into the city, but with each footstep it seems like another building topples, another building burns. The heat rises off the concrete until he can’t go any further even if he wants to. It’s his city, and if it burns, he wants to burn with it.

There’s a rush of air all of a sudden, and he flinches as the dragon dives at him, shooting a stream of fire that just barely misses. The dragon (and that’s what it is, he can’t deny it) circles around in the air. He wants to stand and face it, to look death in the eye from some heroic instinct, and he takes out his gun as the dragon launches itself towards him, and—

He runs. The city breaks around him as he runs through clouds of smoke and falling cinders, through piles of ash up to his ankles, his eyes stinging with sweat and tears.The dragon follows him, a wall of fire in its wake, and he is lucky to be just a few steps ahead, but it’s always behind him, always following, and he knows he can’t outrun it forever.

He makes it back to his house, stumbling through the door and almost knocking over an end table. He turns to slam the door shut, for whatever good it will do, but stops short as the dragon swoops in on the grass. It crouches for a moment, and then instead of a great gold-scaled beast it’s a man. It’s _the_ man, he realizes, aiming the gun at him, and the man looks at him with piercing blue eyes as he stands and approaches the house. 

The man steps across the threshold, keeping his hands held halfway in the air, away from his body. “I’m unarmed,” the man says. “I won’t hurt you. That’s the last thing I want to do.”

He keeps the gun trained on the man. “You’re a dragon! It doesn’t matter if you’re unarmed!”

“I’m a man,” the man says. “My name is Eames. I’m a forger, I can change my shape here in dreams - we work together, up in the real world. Do you remember the real world?”

“ _This_ is the world,” he insists. “This world is real.”

The man - Eames - looks sorrowful. “This is limbo,” he says. “If you go down far enough, through enough layers of dreams, you hit the bottom of things. The edge of consciousness. It feels real because everything in it is from your mind--”

“ _Stop talking!_ ” he shouts, cocking the gun, and he sees Eames flinch minutely. “You’re lying to me, you want me to believe this doesn’t matter because you don’t want me to care that you’re destroying _my city_ —”

“Arthur, please,” Eames says. “Please, don’t do this. You can kill me if you want, but you’ll never get out, you’ll dream your whole life away down here and when you wake up, _if_ you wake up, all that will be left is a shadow.”

“Arthur?”

“That’s you,” he says. “That’s your name. There are others waiting for you up above, people who care about you. We’ve been trying to find you to bring you back.”

Arthur means to be accusatory, to be angry; he finds he can’t summon the energy. “Why did you burn my city?” he asks brokenly. “It was beautiful.”

“Because I didn’t know what else to do, darling,” says Eames. “I’d tried everything else I could think of. But as long as you had something to hold on to, you weren’t going to leave, and - Arthur, I can’t leave you here. You built a city and it’s beautiful, but I can’t go back up there alone. It doesn’t matter if you believe that there’s a real world or not, I need you to trust me. Forget about the dragon. Please - put the gun on the table.” For all that his voice is steady, the look that he gives Arthur is pleading. Arthur hesitates a moment, then nods, flicking the safety on and laying the gun down.

“Now what?”

Eames smiles and turns to the open door, holding out his hand to Arthur. Arthur hesitates a moment, then takes it. They run.

The dream burns to the ground behind them.

Arthur wakes up.


End file.
